Had to put my oar in. I have been using LINUX for a long time, and I think that Mandrake also has the best release right now, but if you are used to being a windows junky, you might see things more familiar with RedHat, but I don't know if they are still doing free downloads. I get my stuff supplied for me from the government since I am a developer and security admin for them.

The LINUX downloads are very popular, especially after a new release, which just happened not too long ago in Mandrake's case. Its not unusual for it to take several days to download. I would see if you can download faster elsewhere, but keep your current one moving, so that you don't lose your place in that queue just in case.

By all means, welcome! I been a Linux junky for a few years. I love it, except my hardward is getting old, I'm considering a workstation for www.pogolinux.com after my tax refund comes around.

Seawarrior

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I will defend my country, its borders, my home, my family at all costs, with any weapon, pre-emptive or otherwise to make my enemy bow to its knees to insure my enemy will never attack my homeland ever again. - unknown

One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Sir Winston Churchill

Mandrake and RedHat were my introkductions, and what I recommend as well for anyone in your shoes, S2. It took me about a half a day total to download the entire boot set for Mandrake 9.1 on my DSL when I was setting someone up with it. One caviat is, Mandrake tends to use some development and beta software in the distro on occasion, but by the time you start running into where that matters, then hopefully you'll be far enough along to replace the package. Mandrake or RH is definately a good place to look, though, for getting started. Seawarrior has covered things pretty well. grab the three 1586 images, burn them to CDs, boot off the first one, and follow the yellow brick road. IIRC, it still lets you use either fdisk or DiskDruid to repartition your drive. I will give you a note too on how to partition it. Where Windows uses a swapfile, Linux uses a swap partition. I recommend one 2x physical RAM if you can. I've got 1.5GB of swap on my main workstation with 1GB of RAM. currently, system reports that it has actually hit it for some reason, and there is 2 MB stored there... I'm also sitting here with 548 MB of RAM free... That, and right now I've got the two most bloated pieces of Linux software I know of, running (OpenOffice.org and Mozilla). If you don't feel comfortable using that much swap, you don't have to of course. Just a metric to go by. The rest of your drive can be mounted at /

I have been using linux for several years. I found that if you have a slow link (phone modem) then it is best to buy your first distribution. You get the disks pre-made and some documentation to work with. If you can not find a copy in one of the "computer" stores, try a book store. Several of the Linux bible type books come with a complete distribution.

For older machines you just have to have at least 32Mb of memory.

I would also suggest Galeon as a web browser. It has a great feature of blocking pop-ups with a preference setting. I hate paying for something that I can get for free.

Madadh: 32MB?? well, maybe for a decent sized workstation. I would not hesitate to install Linux on a 386 2/ 4MB RAM and a 250 MB HDD (and be planning on a specific use for it, wouldn't make that great of a general purpose box, unless you're just wanting a look at the system)

Madadh: 32MB?? well, maybe for a decent sized workstation. I would not hesitate to install Linux on a 386 2/ 4MB RAM and a 250 MB HDD (and be planning on a specific use for it, wouldn't make that great of a general purpose box, unless you're just wanting a look at the system)

If you are trying to load something like RH7.2 or higher, you will need a minimum of 32MB. If you are going to use Linux from scratch, you can get along with a lot less.

Madadh: true, true. My 486 has an 8 GB HDD in it and 12 MB RAM, runs Mandrake 5.2 just peachy even diring the three days it took to build X when I upgraded it. Not that I use X too often on it... after all, it takes 5 minutes to launch. I don't recall X taking that long to load on ym 486 SX/25 when I started using Linux.... (RH 4.2)